The New Liberal Arts Program

Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, 1980-1992

A retrospective review of the "New Liberal Arts Program" of the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation drawn from a variety of internal summative reports.
These notes do not represent a complete summary of the program, but merely
a selection of ideas relevant to quantitative literacy.(QL Home Page)

In the late 1970s, as American public attention was focused on rising
inflation, oil embargoes, and the Iran hostage situation, entrepreneurial
pioneers on the West Coast of the United States invented personal
computing. Between 1977 and 1979, Steven Jobs created the Apple computer;
Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded Microsoft; Bop Metcalfe invented
Ethernet; Hayes marketed the first modem; Epson created an affordable dot-
matrix printer; Intel introduced the 8088 chip, a 16-bit processor; Dan
Bricklin and Bob Frankston introduced the spreadsheet Visicalc; and
WordStar, the first word processor and the database program dBase were
created. In 1980 Ronald Reagan becomes president, Steve Ballmer joins
Microsoft; IBM creates a crash program to develop a personal computer; and
Microsoft agrees to provide the operating system. Few then realized
how the world had changed.

One of those who had a glimmer of the revolution to come was Stephen
White, vice-president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. In 1980, White
argued in an internal memorandum entitled "The New Liberal Arts" that in
the late twentieth century the tools of technology--computing,
quantitative reasoning, applied mathematics--deserve a central place in
liberal education. White argued that just as a century earlier science
claimed a central place in the undergraduate curriculum, so at the dawn of
the twenty-first century these "new liberal arts" deserve a similar
role--not as separate courses or departments, but as a commitment to
quantification and technology infused throughout the arts and humanities.
Not only are these studies essential for the nation's economic vitality,
but they provide perspectives that responsible citizens must have.

A year later White's memorandum together with several brief responses
from educators was published and widely distributed by the Sloan
Foundation, especially to faculty and administrators at selective liberal
arts colleges whom the Foundation viewed as the natural leaders in liberal
education. During the ten year period 1982-92 Sloan awarded 23 liberal
arts colleges nearly $20 million to advance quantitative reasoning and
technological literacy in their curricula. A parallel program for
historically black colleges was supported with $2 million in grants.
Collateral summer workshops, faculty seminars, and a monthly newsletter
(NLA News) helped spread NLA-inspired curricular innovation beyond the
originally funded campuses.

White's argument rested on three distinct foundations. First, technology
itself is increasingly influential in all aspects of life, so
technological literacy deserves as much attention as other components of
the core curriculum. Second, data analysis and quantitative methods--
aided by computer tools--has positioned applied mathematics as an
important tool in many humanities and social sciences. Finally, White
worried that college campuses had largely ignored C. P. Snow's
two-cultures challenge, devising curricular requirements that enable far
too many students to escape serious encounter with the world of
quantification.

Much of the Sloan program was focused on development and implementation of
curriculum in the special context of liberal arts colleges. Core
requirements in mathematics and quantitative reasoning on the funded
campuses varied from none to modest; faculty reaction was equally varied,
ranging from apathetic to enthusiastic. Strategies were equally varied,
from new courses to revisions of existing courses, from short modules to
year-long programs. A sample of titles of courses and modules reveal the
scope of curricular innovation inspired by the NLA Program:

-- Expert Systems. (Trinity)

-- Episodes in American Invention. (Princeton and Bryn Mawr)

-- The Economics of Technology. (Montana State)

-- Hyperacoustics: Digital Sound. (Middlebury)

-- Pacing the Heart. (Carleton)

-- Vaccines: An Introduction to Risk. (Claremont)

-- Garbarge and Trash. (Stony Brook)

-- Witchcraft: History and Statistics. (Mount Holyoke)

-- Chemistry and Crime. (Williams College)

-- Bioengineering and Health Technology. (Davidson College)

-- Phonetics and Phonology. (Swarthmore)

-- Management of Public Risk. (Brandeis)

Several books based on NLA courses were published jointly by McGraw Hill
and MIT Press. These include:

Architectural Technology up to the Scientific Revolution. Robert
Mark (Editor).

Reproductive Technology. Lawrence J. Kaplan and Rosemarie Tong.

In 1993 the Sloan Foundation commissioned Ames Oakes, physicist and former
college president, to review the decade-long New Liberal Arts Program.
His conclusions include the following:

Four out of five students in NLA-supported colleges take at least one
course that requires quantitative reasoning, but only two out of five
take courses that enhance their technological literacy.

Approximately one in four faculty became involved in NLA project work
on the most active third of NLA campuses. Faculty engagement on the
majority of campuses was much lower.

Success on selected campuses is due primarily to a small number of
resourceful faculty backed by solid administrative support.

Faculty seminars enabled colleagueship across disciplines and created
a "culture of conversation" that had heretofore been absent, even in
the liberal arts colleges.

Since the NLA program coincided with the arrival of the personal
computer, the program brought about a far more thoughtful, creative, and
extensive integration of computing into the curriculum than might
otherwise have occurred.

Offerings of NLA courses have declined since the peak of Sloan funding
activity due to increased pressures on institutional budgets and greater
emphasis on traditional scholarship.

According to evaluator Ames, one of the most innovative outcomes of the
New Liberal Arts program was a series of courses at different colleges,
led by Claremont, in which a team of students worked as consultants for an
external (usually off-campus) client. These programs, often called
"clinics," required students to research a real problem facing the client,
plan and execute whatever is required for analysis and recommendations,
and present a final report in a form suitable for professional use by the
client. They greatly enrich students' educational experiences and link
colleges more closely with their surrounding communities. Examples of
clinic projects:

Indirect Costs. To develop a plan to allow the city of San Bernardino to
document the full costs of providing central services to various funds
(enterprise, internal service, special revenue, capital projects, and user
fee) in order to help the city make realistic decisions about fees and
future budgets.

Ethnic Population. Analysis of chronic diseases among ethnic communities
in California in order to educate at-risk groups and provide better health
care to unique communities.

Hunger Project. To develop guidelines for community-based hunger projects
based on an analysis of options for reducing the cost of food and supplies
delivered to economically disadvantaged people in a region of Los Angeles.

Issues and Observations

Technology and Numeracy. The NLA program addressed twin goals of
technological and quantitative literacy, both of which are of increasing
importance in modern society. While different, these goals are intimately
related. Computing has both enabled and compelled mathematical and
statistical methods across the liberal arts and sciences by making
possible analysis of realistic data. Reciprocally, in this age applied
mathematics is practiced primarily on the computer. Both relative
newcomers to liberal education, computing and applied mathematics appear
to fit like hand and glove.

Yet on the NLA campuses the reactions to increased technology and numeracy
have often diverged. In contrast to mathematics which has been part of
liberal education since ancient times, computing (at least in 1980)
typically lived in colleges of engineering which, with few exceptions, are
absent from liberal arts colleges. Thus the case for technology as a
discipline appropriate for liberal education is harder to make than for
applied mathematics. Even after a decade of subsidy from the Sloan
foundation, courses dealing with technological literacy have made only
modest gains at selective liberal arts colleges.

Modes of Thought. Advocates for the New Liberal Arts hoped that
leading liberal arts institutions would embrace not only the computer but
also the modes of thought--principally quantitative reasoning--that
computing employs. By integrating computing effectively into courses
across the curriculum, advocates hoped that student would learn "to reason
effectively with numerical information." In his memorandum on NLA, White
argued that courses in applied mathematics must be seen to lie "at the
heart of the curriculum." Evaluator Ames reports that on the NLA campuses
applied mathematics "is a liberal art," although not yet one that lies at
the heart of the curriculum. Faculty at these institutions are generally
quite aware of the power of computers to help students develop
quantitative intuition. "Numeracy in liberal education," the title of
Spelman's program, is a suitable theme for all the NLA projects.

Pedagogy. Reports from NLA courses--as from virtually all courses
that make thoughtful use of computers--indicate a natural shift in both
teaching and learning styles. Faculty lecture less; students learn more.
Access to data and to tools capable of analyzing that data open up
enormous opportunities for independent student work. (Similar themes
emerged in the movement to reform calculus and K-12 mathematics that
blossomed just as the NLA program was winding down.) Collaborative
learning, both in class, out of class, and now via e-mail, has thrived as
well. On many campuses, the nudge of the NLA argument helped pioneer what
has now become a commonplace recommendation.

Evidence. Most undergraduates have access to social science data
not only unheard of but undreamed of by Ph.D. student just one generation
earlier. The discipline of statistics has been totally transformed by the
power of computers to manipulate data. Evidence from real data can now be
used as the basis for analysis and inference, supplanting the prior
tradition of theorizing based on general principles. Nonetheless,
tradition prevails: despite innovation of NLA and related programs, the
vast majority of students in the United States still study social science
as if real data were untouchable.

Enriching Scholarship. Comments by campus leaders of NLA projects
reveal consistent enthusiasm for the indirect benefit of the program in
helping faculty who hardly knew each other discover common interests. As
a consequence of the substantive interdisciplinary interaction inspired by
the NLA program, many faculty also found that their scholarly interests
were broadened and enriched. Even at liberal arts colleges, the pressures
of scholarship outweigh pedagogy, so curricular innovation can be
sustained in the long run only if it arises from a vigorous professional
and scholarly interest. Many of those who became involved in the NLA
program found that it did have a long-term affect on their professional
interests.

Replication. Not surprisingly, most NLA courses still being taught
in the early 1990s were being taught by the same faculty who created them
eight or ten years earlier. Innovative courses are not easily
transportable or transferable. When new faculty are asked to take on
these courses, they are more likely to create their own than to pick up
the course created by the pioneers. "We can barely get our colleagues to
teach the course on our own campus, let alone getting the course taught at
other universities."

Students. Most NLA courses are intended for students who have
avoided quantitative disciplines and whom mathematicians believe to have
less mathematical ability than do those who study mathematics
voluntarily. In a 1990 analysis of the NLA experience, faculty at the
University of Chicago report that, despite their years of teaching
experience, they were surprised to find that this student stereotype is
quite inaccurate. Their students eagerly embraced many topics that
mathematicians believe to be sophisticated (e.g., systems of differential
equations), yet stumbled on others (e.g., number theory, geometry) that to
a mathematician require virtually no prior knowledge or experience. They
discovered what experienced high school teachers have always known--that
many who have difficulty with abstract mathematics, even if simple, can
readily learn concrete mathematics, even if subtle.